Generally we aren't desperate for mastery these days. Some people are looking towards more threat stats since dodge and parry are hitting heavy diminishing returns (or items with threat stats and reforging away from them). The biggest gain for more mastery now is to be able to use double stamina trinkets, however since one of those have a mastery on use effect it's rendered useless apart from the stamina gain. I don't know what the community on a whole will decide but the 4 set seems like it will be very useful for heroic encounters.

It depends on your situation and what stats you are going for. How much mastery are you looking for? Personally Im going for the ret leggings because I am trying to get rid of my mastery trinket. But in heroic gear I might overcap and go for more avoidance gear. Also keep in mind wich set bonus you want to go for, if you want 4set prot the leggings are a good choice to keep prot.

Crafted tank legs have mastery/dodge, so they trump Ret at least until heroic. Assuming you want 4pc, I think the best choice is to use crafted legs until you have access to heroic legs/shoulders. That drops a lot of mastery, but you'll be picking up so much in other places that you'll have to reforge it away.It's also possible that you could take Spine Heroic shoulders and add a few mastery gems in order to use a second stam trinket. I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect that it's possible to run that setup with only a couple mastery gems with full heroic gear.

Edit: I hallucinated dodge/parry gloves, looks like we're stuck with tier after all.

You can cap using just normal t13 gear. The 4pc set bonuses are amazing for all the AOE damage in the latter half of DS, and I would strongly recommend people go for increasing raid survivability over the personal DPS increase of 2p/2p.

Once you start having some farm content, 2p/2p would be fun if you have an excess of tokens (I wouldn't take the 2pc ret away from the other raiders, because taking the increase in prot dps vs an actual DPS or healer with the set bonus would be criminally selfish), but unless your raid has no problems with the back half of DS, you should probably gear for your primary responsibility.

Well, with proper gear choices you should be maintaining block cap since normal FL. The question for T13 gear choices is whether you have so much mastery that you can't regem it away, and whether a particular dodge/parry piece is worth all the stamina you have to drop for mastery gems.

It's worth noting that for those starting on heroic modes, Morchok dodge/parry shoulders are quite good and you won't be able to deviate from tier legs with them, which drops a bit of mastery (aka stamina) but picks up pure avoidance on both pieces.

PsiVen wrote:Well, with proper gear choices you should be maintaining block cap since normal FL. The question for T13 gear choices is whether you have so much mastery that you can't regem it away, and whether a particular dodge/parry piece is worth all the stamina you have to drop for mastery gems.

We will, and you won't. When I was putting together the T13 gear sets for the MATLAB sims, I had to change the gem templates from mastery-heavy to stam-heavy because I was over-capping mastery pretty heavily. As we get more 397+ gear, we'll be shifting mastery around between slots, but the increase in raw stats should be enough to keep us capped just through reforging and gemming.

There's still little point in getting hit/exp, and if Morchok is one of the first few heroics most guilds attempt, those shoulders will be both easily-accessible and decently-itemized. Since our tier shoulders and gloves have a threat stat, but there's no alternative for the gloves, I think the best way to reach 4-piece will be Head/Chest/Gloves/Legs combined with the Morchok shoulders.